FABLE AND FOLKLORE 57 



which it swallows and excludes again without nutriment." 

 This is an excellent example of the way those old 

 fellows considered a matter of fact as if it were one of 

 opinion — as if the belief or non-belief of a bunch of 

 ancients, who knew little or nothing of the subject, made 

 a thing so or not so. Sir Thomas seems to have been 

 struggling out of this fog of metaphysics and shyly 

 squinting at the facts of nature ; yet it is hard to follow 

 his logic to the conclusion that the allegation of iron-eat- 

 ing and "concocting" (by which I suppose digestion is 

 meant) is not true, but he was right. The poets, how- 

 ever, clung to the story. John Skelton (1460-1529) in 

 his long poem Phyllip Sparrow writes of 



The estryge that wyll eate 



An horshowe so great 



In the stede of meate 



Such feruent heat 



His stomake doth freat [fret]. 



Ben Johnson makes one of his characters in Every Man 

 in his Humor assure another, who declares he could eat 

 the very sword-hilts for hunger, that this is evidence that 

 he has good digestive power — "You have an ostrich's 

 stomach." And in Shakespeare's Henry VI is the re- 

 mark: "I'll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and 

 swallow my sword." 



Readers of Goldsmith's Animated Nature, 32 published 

 more than a century later (1774) as a popular book of 

 instruction in natural history (about which he knew 

 nothing by practical observation outside of an Irish 

 county or two), learned that ostriches "will devour 

 leather, hair, glass, stones, anything that is given them, 

 but all metals lose a part of their weight and often the 



